Data usage on smartphones has been increasing year to year and current average data consumption may exceed 500 megabytes per month. Data plans for smartphone usage charge for limited amounts of data; therefore, users attempt to manage bandwidth consumption to keep costs down.
Known smartphone features track how much data is being consumed and warn the user when a particular threshold is passed. Other known techniques prevent a user's data consumption from exceeding a predefined limit. Current bandwidth sharing approaches are limited to devices that are part of a pre-specified group that are sharing a common pool of entitlement, such as a block of data across the devices each period. The known bandwidth sharing provides only limited collaboration opportunities and fails to optimize the bandwidth sharing among devices based on the devices' different data plans and different suppliers.
International Publication Number WO2012044795, entitled “System and method for managing data sharing over a hotspot network,” discloses a system configured to “receive a selection of a mobile device to receive a data file, notify the mobile device of the data file to share, and transmit the data file to the mobile device in response to receiving a download request from the mobile device” in which “the mobile broadband hotspot may be directed to share the data file with other devices connected to the mobile broadband hotspot through a hotspot network without requiring the other devices to download the data file again through a wide area network.” This approach avoids the need for all devices to download the file, but uses only one data plan and is therefore not a technique for sharing the usage of multiple data plans.
“Towards Resource Sharing in Mobile Device Clouds: Power Balancing Across Mobile Devices” by Abderrahmen Mtibaa et al., MCC'13, Aug. 12, 2013, discloses a Mobile Device Cloud that includes “computational offloading schemes that maximize the lifetime of the ensemble of mobile devices.” The Mobile Device Cloud scheme determines a “best approach to schedule the computation among the set of devices so as to maximize their lifetime” in a localized network while power is available in the devices, but fails to describe a bandwidth consumption optimization or sharing model.
Accordingly, there is a need for a technique that equitably shares bandwidth for cellular data among multiple collaborating devices that have formed an ad hoc group, where the bandwidth is provided by multiple data plans of multiple users who are operating the respective devices.